Cry Silver Bells

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  “Isn’t it rather short?”

  “The tiger’s tail, not your own. Now then, who will be captain?”

  “I” said Eunostos.

  “I’m older,” said Oryx. “The duty should fall to me.”

  “Yes,” said Melissa, “the duty should fall to Oryx.”

  “But I was taught by my uncle.” Polite but firm. “Besides, these are Triton waters, and you’re a foreigner, Oryx.”

  “Eunostos is captain,” I said.

  “You there, Bindweed, throw me a line.”

  Bindweed obeyed without a “cor.”

  I had never known a Beastlier boy. His hooves were sharp; he had learned dexterity, not display, with his tail; and his straight-feathered cap disclosed his pointed ears. But then with Silver Bells for an uncle. . . .

  “And I will look after Silver Bells,” said Marguerite, sweetly solicitous (sincere, I could not doubt, but comelier than I chose, and not like me athirst for her father tree).

  “Silver Bells,” I asked. “You are very quiet. Do your injuries pain you much?” His chest was a map of scratches; his bones must ache from his fight. He had chipped a hoof and lost considerable blood. In a phrase, he hurt.

  “Less than your need for your tree. Sweet dreams, Zoe.”

  “And to you,” I said. Of you, I wanted to say. I merely smiled. I have never been one to chase a man. (I have never needed to chase.)

  “Land ahoy!”

  I lifted my head. The effort cost me hurt. Weariness like a chain affixed me to the couch. But the land was the beach in the cove from which both the cockleshell and the Nilus had begun their voyages. I smelled the cydamen trailing from the cliffs. I counted the cypresses and Melissa looked for violets. I numbered the boats on the beach. I thought of my father tree. “Daughter,” he seemed to say. “Rest from your journey in my leafy arms. Return to child. Forget, remember, renew.” A dream, a dream. Part of my weakening, like a vision which comes with a demon of fever or plague.

  Nevertheless, the beach was real.

  The two Cretan captains, seeing us safe from Tritons and ready to land, reversed their courses and made for the East and home. I lifted a heavy hand. One of the captains bowed and the other winked—I believe I had filled their eye, woman as well as queen. Splendid men, the seamen of Crete, and not like the city-folk. The old yearning lingers in their blood. They have sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules. They have crossed Oceanus to a land so large that they could not find its end, though they landed and traded with men who wore feathers and painted their beardless cheeks. To search is more than to find. To find is more than to keep. . . . So far as they knew, we would disembark Silver Bells, Oryx, and Marguerite and, thus relieved of excessive weight and safe from a Triton attack, sail for the Nile and, partly by caravan because of the cataracts, return to Nubia. I did not like to deceive such men. In an earlier time, we might have been friends and allies.

  Moschus pranced excitedly onto the beach. He had spied us from the cliffs; he must have kept a vigil for our return. Faithful friend! I earnestly hoped that beer had eased his wait (he had a cache in the hull of a rotting boat). Eunostos and Phlebas sprang from the deck and, splattering foam, joined Moschus to beach the ship. Bindweed and Hensbane lifted me from the couch.

  “Mind my robe,” I said. “Don’t soil the stripes.” It was the only time I had been a queen. It saddened me to forego the perquisites of power. A Dryad rules a tree, at most an Asklepion. But I had dined with the Prince who was heir to the throne of Crete; The other four Girls—I could never remember their names—jumped from the ship and caught me in surprisingly gentle arms and settled me on the beach. They must have bathed in seawater during the trip; they did not smell of goat.

  “See?” cried Moschus. “I have brought a bough from your father tree. And a skin of beer from my own private store.”

  I grasped the bough and smothered my face in its reviving leaves. Only a tree can heal, but a bough can act as balm, and it gave me the strength to stand, supported by Moschus and a generous swig of beer, and I turned to confront my friends.

  “I am very proud,” I said.

  “Why, Aunt Zoe?” Eunostos asked, shaking the seawater from his hooves.

  “Because of my faithful friends. Do you realize what you have done?”

  “You, not us,” he corrected. “You were our queen and you planned our triumph and saved my uncle from death. Did you really expect us to fail?”

  “So much wickedness stood in our way!”

  “And you trampled it under foot.”

  “At times I had my doubts.”

  “But you hid them from us and never lost your smile!”

  “Noblesse oblige,” I muttered.

  “Are you speaking Sumerian?” Phlebas asked. “Learned from that lover you mentioned?”

  “Babylonian, not Sumerian. Do you take me for a crone? Now then. Everyone to his house.”

  Melissa lived in a hollow log, a garland of daisies over the door. Silver-Bells and Eunostos had built a workshop under the ground and planted their roof with carrots and radishes. The Goat Girls moved from cave to cave and called the forest their home. Phlebas, like Moschus, enjoyed the hospitality of his friends.

  To reach my father tree, I had to lean on Moschus, not the steadiest Centaur on four hooves. Once I recover my strength, I thought, I shall lean on no one but Silver Bells, and he shall rescue me instead of Alyssum or Marguerite. Once I recover my strength. . . .

  “Moschus,” I said, averting my lips from his intended kiss (his kisses were always wet and lingering. I always felt as if beer had been sloshed in my face. At certain times in the past, I had suffered the slosh. Now I had expectations.) “Did you miss me, my dear?”

  “The Country was like a nest without an egg,” he said, preening himself on the doubtful compliment (I had to recall that he liked an egg in his beer). “In fact, your absence has driven me to drink. I think you should give an orgy to celebrate.”

  My previous orgy could not be called a success. As a hostess, perhaps I am too unsettling to be at my best; an ideal hostess effaces herself in the crowd; looks to her guests, their pleasure, their food and drink. Alas, in spite of myself, I invariably overshadow my entertainment, my choicest dish, my oldest wine, and end as dessert.

  “Orgies must wait,” I said.

  “Until you’ve regained your strength,” said Silver Bells. “Then I will ask the Naiads to entertain you under one of their springs. You won’t have to do a thing.”

  The Naiads are blue-haired ladies whose caverns under the water are treasure troves of the gems they collect in the springs: Shy, gentle ladies—except Alyssum, stubborn as well as kind—and no more obtrusive than a cooling breeze.

  Since Alyssum’s death, Silver Bells had avoided Alyssum’s people. Why the change? Of course! An engagement party! Having at last recovered from his grief, he wished to make his announcement among her kin, a courtesy as it were, to tell them that he had never intended to exclude them from his affairs; accept their forgiveness for the apathy of his grief.

  “Give me a week,” I said. “Then you will see the Zoe who captured the heart of the Prince of Crete!”

  “Are we invited?” the Goat Girls asked with their usual unanimity. They were seldom invited to parties in the Country. They behaved at their worst, tippled and swore and tried to tease the men with charms which would never bud, much less bloom. But after their faithful attendance in the arena, after their service aboard the ship, how could Silver Bells strike them from his list?

  “What is a party without my friends?” asked Silver Bells.

  “Ear that?” asked Hensbane to Bindweed. “What’ll we wear?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Better ask Zoe, eh? She knows the proper weeds.”

  “Something capacious,” I said.

  “Think she said a cape. . . .”

  “And me? Phlebas asked. “Shall I wear my tiger’s tail?”

  “What else? It becomes you as if you had g
rown it yourself.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “And I shall string a necklace with violets,” Melissa said. And Oryx can escort me from my log.”

  “But Marguerite and I are still under sentence of exile,” reminded Oryx.

  “A Naiad party should even soften Chiron. The ladies are famous for their persuasiveness, and Moschus will ply his cousin with drink and loosen his tongue. That is to say, you naughty boy, if you restrain your animalistic desires. We can’t have another incident.”

  He sighed and smiled (the rogue), and I could guess his lecherous thought. “Oh, very well. I shall have to get drunk and avoid temptation.”

  “Wine increases desire.” (Echoes of Chiron.)

  “And limits performance. Dead drunk, I mean. I shall probably be carried out with the first course.”

  A delicate shadow flickered across the ground.

  A saffron butterfly.

  Alyssum perhaps to greet our return?

  I could swear she had flown from our ship.

  Chapter Twelve

  Zoe

  When the Centaurs had brought the Naiads from the Orient, they had left a few in Egypt (heavy with colt), and settled the rest on Crete in a fountain home. The Cretan Mother’s sister, she of the East (though, many say that she and the Mother are One), is said to have spun them along with pigeon-blood rubies and tiger lilies—useless but decorative. They did not weave, they neither gardened nor cleaned the hearth; they danced and sang or played a lyre which they called a “mandolin” and recited poems; took a morning to arrange a flower. To them an hourglass was useless as well as ugly.

  Silver Bells had supplied the food; Moschus had brought the wine and the beer (cadged from his friends). Otherwise, we would dine on bird’s nest soup.

  “And we shall supply the tea and the song,” said Thyme, their queen. “For Silver Bells is our friend, and he has returned to us.”

  I have fallen asleep at their parties, and not from the tea, which reminds me of muddy water in a porcelain cup.

  But tonight, tonight . . . In the ear of my mind I heard my beloved announce,

  “Zoe and I shall be wed. I have lived too long with a ghost.”

  Intoxicated with expectation, what did I need with wine?

  Moschus had pleaded to escort me to the cave (“Before I have had a nip!”). Oryx had said, “But we are friends of the road. Why not come with me? (I promise not to pounce).”

  “I have an escort,” I said (mysterious Zoe, relishing mystery! Let them conjecture who had won my heart. What would they think of a husband instead of a lover?) I went to the party companioned only by hope. I felt like more than a queen; I felt like a girl.

  We talk about butterflies in the stomach when we are fearful of danger or ecstatic with hope. The feeling is more like sparrows building a nest! The Naiads would probably mistake me for a mute: talkative Zoe, a griffin has her tongue! Still, I was coming to listen, not to speak, and the words I expected to hear would resound through my head like silver bells (can you think of a better analogy for the occasion?).

  I walked the avenue called the Path of the Moon: sand and milky seashells under the stars. Shower-of-gold, Bird-of-paradise, looking as if it could fly, and tamarisk made a western East of the place. I approached the entrance to the Naiad cave, the House of the Seventh Bliss. The ladies, of course, who spend their days in the fountain above their cave, have an entrance under the water, but they do like evening guests, they do like to please, and Silver Bells had dug them a tunnel opening into the forest for those who do not wish or know how to swim.

  Two wooden dragons flanked the door. By “dragon” I mean the amiable Eastern kind, more of a watch dog and pet than a brute, bringer of luck and guardian of the cave. The cypress gates were open like welcoming arms, since the Country is free of Sphinxes and wolves; and Satyrs and Centaurs, even if drunk, would never crash a party for Silver Bells. I rang a golden bell in the shape of a bird; its clapper looked like a tongue in a sunbird’s mouth.

  With short, shuffling steps, one of the Naiads appeared in the door. Marjoram she was called. She wore a loose-fitting robe, caught at her waist with a wide, crimson sash, and reaching to feet so small that they scarcely seemed to fill her embroidered shoes. It was not yet dark; I could see her hair, dried from her swim and cloudy about her head. Not disheveled, you understand. I surmised the careful tease of a tortoiseshell comb. And of course her hair was blue and her eyes were violet. Her skin was as white as the foam from the fountain’s tree. You might have thought that the vivid hair and eyes, in contrast to the skin, would have made her look like a woman possessed by a fever or robbed of blood by a Strige’s insatiable tongue. Pallid and drained of life. No, she was like an ivory figurine, new and not yet yellowed by the years, with daintily painted features and the hush of an artifact. A work of art, not life. None of the Naiads except Alyssum had looked entirely real. But then, the Eastern Mother had meant them to decorate, and though I preferred an earthier race, I could not quarrel with a goddess’ handiwork.

  She extended her arms; her voluminous sleeves, as violet as her eyes, fell to her waist. She bowed and smiled a small but immaculate smile; a Naiad never laughs, and every movement, every gesture, is slow, studied, and graceful.

  “My house is honored,” she said, “most esteemed of my guests, Zoe, the Dryad of Crete. Famed for her travels, envied for her loves, celebrated for beauty these four hundred years. . . .”

  “Marjoram, dear,” I said. “You may skip the formalities and take me to your guests. By the way, the number is three, not four. Hundred, that is.”

  “Yes, my estimable friend. But age is accounted a virtue in the East.”

  “In the West, it is gray hairs and a thickening waist. Am I your first guest?”

  “The first and the best.”

  “Then I will chat with you and your friends till the others arrive.” I stooped and entered the tunnel and pitied Moschus, who would scrape the walls with his flanks, and rose in the midst of a garden.

  Of sorts.

  Rocks instead of flowers. Black, contorted plants instead of bushes or trees. Nothing of color, little of life to catch the eye; (But I remembered Bumpers, the Hill. Perhaps I stood on a god.)

  Marjoram paused for me to admire the place. “I have seen it before. Lovely,” I said, and, never liking to lie, hurried ahead of my hostess into a bare, circular room where the Naiads awaited their guests. “Tea house,” they call the place, after their favorite beverage (aptly too), and I hurried to greet my other hostesses before I should have to repeat the lie.

  There were ten of them. They did not resemble each other in spite of identical hair and eyes. They wore such a richness of colors—gowns, sleeves, sashes, and slippers—so as to seem a scatter of precious stones. Aquamarine stood next to amethyst, jade to cornelian . . . lapis lazuli, onyx, and peridot. . . . In my mind, I compared them to gems in spite of their flower-like names, for again they were more of art than of life. They shuffled about the room on tiny feet, took my sandals, arranged a cloak around my shoulders (the fountain chilled the room), and seated me on a floor of fitted cypress squares. Yes, on the floor. True, they gave me a mat but the cypress was very hard and the mat of rushes was hardly a chair or a couch. I tried to cross my legs like my hostess and look at ease; I fear I had the look of having stumbled and tried in vain to rise. My feet were crooked, I burst a grasshopper pendant from my gown, and the ache in my rear made me stifle a groan.

  The room was unfurnished except for a table with fig-sized cups—much too small for wine—and a plump, snouted vessel called a “pitcher.” Unfurnished, I say, but I will have to count a “bonsai tree,” a sort of vegetable dwarf whose limb’s are deliberately stunted like a Naiad’s feet, set on a table against the wall and lit by a lantern hanging from the roof. There were also mats for the other guests and, hidden behind a screen enwrought with rock crystal and black jade, skins of beer from Moschus’ depredations, and melons from Silver Bells’ garden, an
d pheasants, and . . . yes, Eunostos’ choicest carrots.

  Well, I had undergone other Naiad parties, without any beer or food and without any expectation. Only tea, brewed from the camomile plant. (“Tea and, sympathy,” Moschus called such parties. “Sympathy for the guests who must drink the tea.”)

  The guests arrived in a beautifully awkward group, chatting excitedly, greeting Thyme and her Naiads and lifting me from the floor for a hug or a kiss (and a curious look, as if to ask the name of my newest love): Bindweed and Hensbane and their friends of our voyage, prodigal with their “cor’s”; Eunostos and Silver Bells, arm in arm and smiling at me as if I belonged between them; Phlebas, stupefied into silence by the exalted occasion (or the seeming lack of food?). Moschus and Chiron—the Whinnies had stayed at the gate—both of them wearing jerkins—Chiron in red with stripes of brown to match his tufted mane, his unadorned back ashine and scented with nard; his six wives, no doubt, had spent the afternoon to groom him for the affair. Melissa, last of the group, like the nub of a tail which brings up the rear of a bear.

  “My sweet,” said Chiron to Thyme. “You and your friends have done yourselves proud. But where is the beer? My cousin and I have a thirst.”

  “First the tea,” said Thyme, with the hint of a bow, “and a welcoming song.” While her sisters poured the tea, she accompanied herself on a mandolin.

  “Tea and sympathy,” Chiron muttered